"object" lessons; and in order to make them more interesting procured from home, at his own expense, little specimens of coke, "Wall's End," Kentish filberts, and many other productions of the land of their forefathers of which his Australian pupils were necessarily ignorant. It unfortunately happened, however, that any method of instruction which appealed directly to the intelligence of the scholar was as great a novelty in Barladong as it would have been in some parts of England fifty years ago, and the local Conservatives, who had never before heard of such roads to learning as lessons on objects, denounced them as sheer waste of time, devices of the master's own invention to save himself the trouble of teaching.
These objections had but little weight with candid parents, who noticed the improvement of their children in spite of such unusual means of promoting it; but in the small society of Barladong there were some to whom a schoolmaster of the only type that they had as yet seen brought profit of another kind, and who little relished the appearance amongst them of one whose education and refined manner seemed to challenge a respect which had not hitherto been accorded, in that place, to a member of his profession. The publicans gained nothing by him, for he spent no money in drinking, and his thrift made him independent of the storekeepers, both of which classes had been used to consider that a schoolmaster was a creature habitually "out-at-elbows," who would thankfully receive payment in kind for posting up their books.
A clamour, in which the self-interests of different parties dovetailed, and in which each made a tool of the other, was accordingly raised against the schoolmaster,
